Pete Thamel breaks down next steps for Brett Yormark, Big 12

New Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark has made his stance clear when it comes to conference realignment. At the conference media days this past week, Yormark said the league is “open for business” and his top goal as commissioner is to bring value.

Yormark is not officially set to take over as the Big 12 commissioner until Aug. 1, so any moves he is looking to make will have to wait until at least then. With that date less than two weeks away, ESPN reporter Pete Thamel joined SEC This Morning on Tuesday to provide to lay out what the next steps for the conference could be.

“If those guys come early to the SEC, speaking of Oklahoma and Texas, it would probably only be for the final year of that deal,” Thamel said. “They have three years left right now and that’s because the ESPN contract starts in full that year, so I think everybody would be incentivized to do that. If you’re the Big 12 right now and you have the leverage of perhaps granting them that early exit, what do you want from them? Is it cash? Is it games scheduled? … Brett Yormark is a wheeler-dealer. He’s a Northeast guy who really doesn’t have a lot of ties to college sports. He said they’re ‘open for business,’ and I think that’s a wise way for him to sit down and say, ‘OK, look, what can we do?’”

The Sooners and Longhorns are set to leave the Big 12 for the SEC by at least 2025 when the league’s media rights deal is set to expire. However, some have speculated they could work out a deal with Yormark to depart even earlier. Yormark did not get into specifics on what a potential deal could look like, but said last week he is seeking a “win-win scenario” that benefits all parties.

The possibility of adding more teams is another thing to consider for Brett Yormark and the Big 12. BYU, Cincinnati, Houston and UCF are all set to join the league by 2023, but the conference could look to expand even further. There have been rumors that some teams from the Pac-12 could decide to bolt for the Big 12 after USC and UCLA left for the Big Ten. Thamel pointed to four schools — Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah — as the most likely fits based on their location and ties with other schools in the conference.

“He said he’s open for business, right? So I think he’s declared himself a hunter,” Thamel said. “You talk about contiguous states. The Arizona schools, Colorado — a former member of the league — and Utah certainly make sense. Don’t forget, the BYU-Utah rivalry is Florida State-Florida, but it’s in the mountain time zone, so you don’t hear about it a lot. You want to talk about cubicle talk, in downtown Salt Lake City — it’s not the fifth-biggest market in the country, it’s the 35th-biggest-ish. That’s a big deal. You, institutionally, at Utah want to be tied to BYU. That’s a big lure and it makes geographic sense, which some of these don’t.”

In this age of college football, it is impossible to predict what will happen next. But Thamel’s assessment of the Big 12 at least gives somewhat of an idea of where the conference might be headed once Brett Yormark takes over.